principles of punk in that you band together and control your own means of production, etc. I’ve always found this a very reassuring aspect of your work. Can you say something about this approach and its importance to you? I want to belong in [the collective] as well. I can remember when I was like twelve or thirteen listening to early Velvet Underground stuff in my mum’s back bedroom, and suddenly you’re in that place. You think you’re there in Andy Warhol’s Factory. You dream into the things. The thing [I create] is apart from me. I’m as much a fan of it as anyone else. I want to walk in that environment. It’s made for me as well. I want to belong in there too. When I was standing next to Kenneth Anger I was like, what the fuck is going on? And when that [announcement of the new Primal Scream single] came out with Mark Stewart and Robert Plant, I’m thinking what the fuck am I doing next to Robert Plant? Because I’m still a twelve or thirteen year old fan-boy. I thought, in punk, it was always going to be a kind of ‘anti-star’ thing where you weren’t meant to be [the most important person] on the stage and everybody was meant to be as important as everybody else. So I’m always judging myself by what my younger self would be thinking while standing looking at it. And I would actually buy what I make. I’m my own worst critic, that’s why things can take some time. At the moment I’m spending weeks on end on one line, just trying to get this essence into one line. It’s driving me bloody mad. Even if it doesn’t come out, I’ll at least have written it down. One of the things that is really striking about The Politics of Envy is that, despite all of the genre clashes and experimental complexities, there’s an overall gloss and groove binding the whole thing together. It is in essence a pop record in the best possible sense of the term; contemporary, accessible, and compelling. How would you describe your relationship with both pop music and the underground? Do you consciously straddle both worlds? I think some experimental stuff is a ghetto. It’s like vanity publishing. I grew up on London Musicians Co-Op and people making weird honking noises and impersonating crocodiles and stuff. I grew up on that kind of stuff. But consciously I just want to engage with the media at the moment. It’s important. Look at all these great thinkers who were just self-publishing stuff to smaller and smaller [groups of] people. What is the point? The point is we want to get across to as many people as possible who have just watched The X Factor or something. If the New York Dolls hadn’t gone through Mercury and went on The Old Grey Whistle Test and stuff, I wouldn’t have changed. I’d be working in some shitty job, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But you’ve got to engage with the thing. If we’ve got to go on the BBC or whatever, there’s cool people in all those places. I mean the idea of the underground and the overground when you’ve got someone like Matt Groening doing The Simpsons and cool people all over the place, this whole idea of ‘I’m cooler than thou’, and ‘I’m completely and utterly indie’… It’s ultimately a dead end.
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